RHF Joke Headers and Bodies

If you look at the jokes, you will see they have all sorts of strange
words and phrases under the title. This section tells you how to
interpret these headers.

Each joke has a centered header that gives the title of the joke,
the "mailing address" and name of the person who sent it, and some
information on the content and quality of the joke. Here's what you might
see:

There and Back Again
bilbo@bagend.shire.org (Bilbo Baggins)Hobbiton Computer Centre
(chuckle, heard it)

The titles are straightforward and set in large bold type. Sometimes
these titles were chosen by the people who submitted the joke, but
often they have been chosen by the editor. In the case of titles
provided by submitters, you will often see words like "submission,"
or references to things that seem to have no antecedent. Fear not --
and simply enjoy the joke.

The Submitter's Address

If you're not a USENET user, the next line in every joke will be
the hardest to understand. The names provided here are actually an
address you would type to an electronic mail program if you
wanted to send a message to one of these people on the USENET,
UUCP NET, ARPANET or, generally, "INTERNET" electronic mail networks.

Because there are so many networks, and they all, at least at one time,
used different forms for mailing addresses, these strings of letters
and symbols can look like gobbledygook. In general, they consist
of three parts, namely "user names," "site names" and "domains."
A user name (The part to the left of a % or @, or to the
right of an !) is the identification of a person on his or her own
computer. This will usually be something like their first name,
initials, last name or a nickname. It varies from place to place.
You might consider a user name to be like a combination of a person's
name and street address number.

A site name is the name of a computer on the electronic mail
network. Roughly, this corresponds to a street name in the postal
mail addresses that everybody is familiar with.

Finally a domain is usually a collection of computers. This is
analogous to a city, state or country. (To get technical, a site
is also called a domain.)

Many of them are intuitively obvious -- for example harvard.edu is
Harvard University (in the educational hierarchy). Others,
unfortunately, will look like gibberish to the uninitiated.

Here's an example of a modern mailing address and what it means:

bilbo@bagend.shire.midearth (Bilbo Baggins)

In this case, there is a domain called midearth, which is
quite large, and contains a domain called shire. In that
domain, there is a computer called bagend and one of the
users on that computer is identified by the name bilbo. We read
this by saying there is a bilbo ``at'' bagend. The
words in parentheses are ignored by a mailing program, and usually
contain the person's real name.

While there are people striving for domains arranged according to
geography, that's fairly rare at this point. Instead, domains follow
institutional and corporate structure, and sometimes even network
structure. Top level domains that you might see include:

ARPA

The old Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency network--the
grandfather of the modern structured networks. (Obsolete)

CSNET

A special network of computer science research computers, mostly
at universities. (Obsolete)

MIL

A non-classified military network.

COM

The general domain for commercial institutions and corporations. (North America)

NET

A domain for providers of network services. (North America)

EDU

The general domain for educational institutions. (North America)

GOV

The general domain for government institutions. (USA)

BITNET

A network of IBM mainframes.

US

A geographical domain for the USA.

CA

A geographical domain for Canada.

AU

Geographical domains for Australia.

UK,etc.

Geographical domains for European nations (standard 2-letter country code.)

UUCP

The old network of Unix machines that communicate with a special
program called the Unix to Unix Copy Program.

UUCP

In olden days,
machines on the UUCP network had to specify mail addresses by listing
all the machines that would forward the mail towards its final
destination. Sort of like listing the names of all the postal workers
you expect to carry a letter on the envelope. Nowadays, many
machines keep big files that list the right route to every known
machine, and you don't have to name the postal workers. If a message
goes to the UUCP ``domain,'' you hope it gets to such a machine,
and that this machine has heard of the computer you eventually want
to get to. It's not really reliable.

On the UUCP network, you listed a chain of machines by delimiting them
with exclamation points. So a message to:

decvax!clyde!watmath!looking!brad

meant that you wanted the machine decvax to forward the message
to machine clyde, which would forward on to watmath, and so
on to looking, where you would hope there was a user named ``brad.''
You will sometimes see addresses like this in this book, and it pays to simply
look at the end, which is looking!brad.

Another thing to note is that:

Brad Templeton <brad@looking.UUCP>

is the same as:

brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)

The type of brackets determines what part is a comment, and what part is
a mailing address. Both of these are the same as the looking!brad
shown above.